It was with some interest then that I read a piece on Mashable on what Foursquare CEO and co-founder Dennis Crowley said atad:tech in New York earlier this week.
In the last few months I have had several conversations with people basically asking, “Foursquare – pretty cool but what’s next?” For some time now I have been checking in to a myriad of places, earning mayorships (WIT included!) and badges and, I think, frustrating some of my Facebook friends with the steady stream of location updates.
Sure, we’ve had the mayor-specific offers, the checkin promotions (free fries at Brewerkz in Singapore for example) and the local tips and comments. But I’ve felt now for some time that there had to be more coming.
So it was then on Wednesday that Mr Crowley gave us an insight into a couple of new products launching in a few months’ time.
He talked about ‘Customized Recommendations’. “Every checkin should mean something”, he said. He went on to say that ‘mean’ in this case would be Foursqaure building a notion of ‘understanding’ about the user and being able to make specific and customized suggestions based on the history of the user’s checkins and behavior.
“Every checkin should mean something,” he stressed. “Foursquare should get smarter every time that you continue to check in. We should be able to offer special deals that you may be interested in and we should be able to offer recommendations for the type of things you should do next.”
He gave examples of a couple of instances:
“Based upon these bars that you’ve been to, these are six other bars you may be interested in.”
“Hey, you just touched down in Chicago, you don’t know anything about Chicago, but based on your Foursquare history in New York, here are the things you should do while you’re here for a couple of days.”
He went on to elaborate this ‘core’ additional functionality and talk about how, in partnering with brands and other companies, Foursqaure could act as a brand and product recommender.
“On our white board, pretty high up is brand discovery. Remember [when] Twitter used to do suggested [users]? That’s the idea, but it’s based on where you go. Here are some spirits brands you may be interested in, here are some travel brands you may want to follow, here are some nightlife brands or restaurant brands you may want to follow.
“And as brands get better with surfacing content within Foursquare, we’ll get better at surfacing that content back up to users,” he said.
It’s not a big leap; in fact no real leap at all, to understand how this type of functionality – this type of sentiment analysis that Crowley talks about – could have significant implications in the travel industry.
I mean, imagine partnering up with Foursqaure and having access to a user’s travel profile based on their actual travel history (not what they ‘say’ they like or dislike) and being able to customize and create engagement around this ‘real’ understanding.
I don’t have his phone number but I’m sure he has email.
Featured image credit (This is my location concept): Ockra/iStock
